


What You Break Is What You Get

by Anonymous



Category: Roswell New Mexico (TV 2019)
Genre: M/M, Malex, interlude between second and third eps
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-13
Updated: 2019-04-13
Packaged: 2020-01-12 12:06:18
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,492
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18446210
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: Stolen nights in the airstream. Michael and Alex revisit old wounds and give each other new ones. They're much better at sex than they are at talking, but then they already knew that, didn't they?





	What You Break Is What You Get

**Author's Note:**

> Only on a repeat viewing did I notice that Michael's airstream moves locations between episodes 2 & 3, signaling the passage of more time than I thought had elapsed. A happy discovery that inspired me to fill in some of the time they spent together before the incident at the drive-in.

Something sends Alex bolting upright. Gasping in the dark, uncertain where he is. Kandahar. Mosul. No. Roswell. His right leg itches. There’s something he can’t quite remember. He shivers. His eyes finally adjust and the airstream materializes around him. He’s almost afraid to look but when he does it’s all right. Michael Guerin is sprawled beside him on the too-small bed, naked, asleep. Or is he? First one eye cracks open, then the other. His warm, calloused hand settles on Alex’s shoulder. _You okay there?_ Except his voice sounds so far away, Alex can’t be sure he spoke at all. _Michael_ he tries to say, but he can’t make a sound. Water rising. There’s a suffocating pressure in his chest. He tries to tell Michael that he can’t breathe but only an odd sort of grunt emerges. He’s fathoms deep underwater, sinking deeper still. _Of his bones are coral made._ Salt on his tongue. _Those are pearls that were his eyes._ But there’s no ocean in the middle of the desert. He opens his mouth to scream and water floods his senses.

“Alex.”

His right leg itches.

“Alex, c’mon back. Come back to me, it’s okay.”

The ocean vanishes. His lungs clear. He can breathe.

“Michael,” he says.

“Yeah, I’m here. I got you.”

Arms around him.

“Michael,” he says again, and then it bursts out of him. “My leg itches.”

He sounds like a child.

“Don’t scratch,” Michael says, still gravelly with sleep, and his arms loosen. “Imma grab some lotion.”

Alex clutches him and digs bruising fingers into his arms. “It _itches_ , Michael, it itches—” He feels Michael’s hand moving down his thigh, covering the scarred, pitted skin where his leg stops but how can it _stop_ that can’t be right because it _itches, itches_ , and then he remembers. Roughly, he knocks Michael’s hand aside.

“Don’t.”

He turns his back and curls in on himself. This stupid phantom itch has him absurdly close to tears. And instead of the privacy of his own bed, he’s riding out his night terrors in _Michael Guerin_ ’s bed, and they’re not seventeen anymore. They’re a decade older and everything hangs unspoken between them even though they’ve spent every night together since their abrupt reunion a few days ago. And they still _fit_ , they do, but Alex doesn’t know how to be with him any more than he did at seventeen. Michael is just _so much_ , he makes Alex feel _so much_ , things he doesn’t have words for but feels in his bones, even the bones that aren’t there anymore.

“Alex, look at me.”

His muscles are cramping, he’s holding himself so tightly. “I don’t want to talk, Guerin.”

“That’s okay. Just turn around and look at me, please.”

He feels Michael’s hands on him. Permits himself to be gently rolled over until he’s on his other side facing him. Michael is beautiful, whether he’s under the scorching heat of the sun or wrapped in darkness as he is tonight. Hair a riot of untamed curls. His broad shoulders, the entrancing jut of his hipbones. His eyes. Suddenly Alex can’t look away, can’t blink. It feels like a glass drawing back and he can see through and beyond Michael’s eyes to something distant and ineffable, antediluvian and ancient. Did Michael have these eyes ten years ago? _Nothing of him that doth fade_ Or did Alex just never look into them properly? _But doth suffer a sea-change_ He sees something so far above and beyond human that suddenly he feels a flash of unease _Into something rich and strange_ that turns so quickly into desire he’s dizzy again.

Alex closes his eyes.

When he opens them, he sees Michael looking at him across the pillow, brow furrowed, eyes—familiar, beautiful eyes—soft with concern. So Alex kisses him.

Michael hesitates. Alex can _feel_ him hesitating, searching for words. When Michael pulls back slightly, opens his mouth, Alex follows him and slides his tongue between his lips before he can say anything. He pours everything into the kiss and Michael only resists a few seconds before he’s dragging Alex closer, nudging his legs open and collapsing between them. For all his rough and ready, fuck-you-dirty posture, Michael is patient and careful where it counts. He takes his time. It’s almost sweet, or would be, if they were different people. Alex wants it fast and hard, tells Michael so, pulls his hair, bites his mouth, scratches at his back, but Michael ignores the goading and fucks him slow, circling his hips and grinding down with each thrust. It’s excruciating. Alex wants to come but he doesn’t want to cry. The tears happen anyway, and he comes when Michael wraps a hand around his cock. He’s still crying when Michael shudders through his own orgasm a few moments later. After cleaning them off a bit, Michael holds Alex close and that’s how he falls asleep, head on his chest, listening to the lub-dub, lub-dub of Michael’s heart. His leg doesn’t itch anymore.

  
*

  
They fight. He starts it. They’re sitting outside the airstream, drinking cheap beer, watching the sun go down. Drawing out anticipation for the moment when they’ll go inside and tear each other’s clothes off. There are questions Alex wants to ask Michael, difficult ones having to do with why he threw away his life after high school, but he can’t formulate the words so he bursts out with something else entirely. “Do you like women or men better?”

Michael’s eyebrows shoot up, disappearing under his mop of curls. Alex flushes slightly, but fuck it, he’s curious. Curious which bruise, if pressed, will hurt more.

“Women,” Michael says, apparently without thought.

“Oh,” Alex says. It hurts.

“I mean…” Michael hesitates. His eyebrows return to their normal position, but they’re knitted in a frown. He shakes his head. “It’s not that simple. I guess that’s what I mean.”

“Okay,” Alex says. Then: “So am I the only guy you’ve ever…?”

“No.”

This bruise hurts too.

Michael looks uncomfortable. “But you’re the only one I—” he begins, then cuts himself off, shaking his head again.

“What?” Alex pushes, even though he’s already bruised like an overripe fruit and he may not like the answers any more than Michael likes the questions.

“Like I said before. Where I stand, nothing’s changed.” Michael’s chin is up, defiant, but his gaze is level.

“ _Everything_ ’s changed, Guerin,” he snaps, unsettled by the intensity of Michael’s expression. When he left home, he’d thought to protect Michael from his father. But instead of going to school and getting a job at NASA, Michael has become this… this _deadbeat_ , this barfly fucking his way through half of Maria’s clientele. Alex doesn’t like to think he had any part in this waste of the brilliant, ambitious boy he’d fallen in love with. So he lashes out: “Just because you’re exactly where you were ten years ago doesn’t mean the rest of us are. _I’m_ certainly not. You have no idea who I am now.”

“And you think you know who I am?” Michael’s getting pissed now, raising his voice.

“It’s obvious,” Alex says coldly. Hating himself a little. Wondering what they’ve done to each other, that it’s so easy to drive a knife into the fissures of the other’s defenses.

Michael laughs. A harsh, dry sound that breaks Alex inside. “Manes, you ain’t got a fucking clue.”

They don’t have sex that night. Alex gets in his car and leaves. But he comes back the next night, and they do.

  
*

  
Another night Michael eats him out and it’s just the most filthy, obscene thing. Bold Michael, not even asking, not even needing to. His senses are fizzing with arousal and desire and shocked relief. Everything goes a bit wobbly but Michael’s hands, spreading him open, are firm and steady. A noise escapes his throat, sounding something like a sob, but then Michael works his tongue in deeper, filling him and holding him and inescapable. This heady, overwhelming madness.

  
*

  
The third or fourth night they spend together, Michael clearly has something on his mind. After they strip off their clothes and Alex’s prosthesis is stationed safely against the wall, Michael lies on the bed and pulls Alex down on top of him. By the cant of his hips, the tremor in his hands, and the slightly bashful expression on his face, he intimates, wordlessly, that he would like Alex to fuck him.

Alex freezes.

They’ve never done it that way before. A flame of nervous excitement kindles inside him before it extinguishes abruptly. There’s no way he can do it, not with half a leg. Not enough leverage to fuck Michael face-to-face, not enough balance to put Michael on his hands and knees and do it from behind. He hates Michael a little for even suggesting it, when the thing is so obviously impossible.

“Won’t work,” he says tersely.

“I think it’s working fine,” Michael says, reaching between them to squeeze his dick. Because, sue him, his cock likes the idea, a lot—even if his brain knows better.

“It won’t work,” he repeats, looking down at the hated stump, and Michael finally seems to catch his drift. But to Alex’s annoyance, Michael doesn’t appear particularly fazed.

“I could ride you,” he points out, and it’s true, Alex hadn’t considered that. But the whole conversation has made him ashamed and angry, defensive of his limitations and loath to have his nose rubbed in them. “I’ve been waiting a long time to try this,” Michael is saying, voice dropping lower. “Been waiting for you, I guess.”

But Alex doesn’t want to try new things. Not when failure would mean the greatest mortification of all. If he couldn’t make it good for Michael, if he couldn’t fuck Michael as good as Michael fucks him, if he couldn’t make Michael writhe and buck and flail and lose his goddamn mind from the ecstasy of it—… No.

“No,” he says, pretending not to notice the flicker of disappointment or maybe even hurt in Michael’s eyes. He’s always disappointing Michael, walking away, shunting their relationship into furtive dark corners. You’d think, after his run-in with the IED that took his leg, he’d have nothing left to fear. But back home in Roswell, he’s found plenty. His father, for one. And shame, the constant shame and fear of more shame, for another. And so he’ll have to disappoint Michael yet again, despite the look in his eyes, because the worst part of him thinks his pain and Michael’s aren’t remotely comparable.

He hates himself.

Michael reaches out with his left hand, the one his father mangled, and runs his palm up Alex’s side. “What are you doing?” Alex hisses.

“Touching you,” Michael replies evenly. His fingers trail back down, raking over Alex’s hip.

“Why?”

“’Cause you’re letting me.”

A pleasurable shudder runs down his spine. “Can you please just fuck me?” he asks plaintively.

“That’s what you want?” Michael sounds slightly defeated, but hardly unwilling.

“ _Yes_.” And it’s true. Alex wants to be surrounded by, smothered in, _suffocated_ by Michael. Because it’s the only thing that makes him feel safe and whole these days. Lost and found all at once. “But don’t you dare go easy on me,” he warns. “I mean it, Guerin. Want to still feel you tomorrow.”

“Oh you’ll feel me,” Michael assures him. Thick with innuendo.

But Alex can’t get him to forego prep altogether, even though his body is re-accommodating itself to their nightly activities. “C’mon Guerin,” he barks, but Michael just smirks and keeps stretching him open, with the occasional teasing brush of his prostate. Alex begins to pant, arching against him. He turns his face up blindly and Michael is there, kissing him.

It makes Alex ache.

He twines his arms around Michael’s neck and steals the air from his lungs.

They kiss and kiss and when Michael finally withdraws his fingers—somehow he’s already got the condom, Alex neither knows nor cares how—and replaces them with his cock, he sighs with relief. He brings his hips up and takes Michael in all the way.

Michael is wild-eyed, breathing heavily. He hitches Alex’s good leg around his waist, pulls almost all the way out, and slams back in. The obscene slap of skin makes Alex dizzy and desperate for more. Michael gives it to him. But he won’t let Alex bury his face in his shoulder; he nudges him up, kisses him. “Look at me,” he commands.

It’s not as rough as Alex thought he wanted it, because in bed Michael knows him better than he knows himself and gives him what he needs.

It’s not a punishment either, even if he thinks it should be one, because Michael loves him more than he hates him, even if Alex thinks that should be the other way around, too.

He can’t look away.

  
*

  
Going about his day at the base, shopping for groceries, even stopping in at the Pony for a chat with Maria, he counts the hours until he can drive out to the desert and knock on the door of the airstream. Michael will be there waiting for him. Lounging insouciantly in the doorway, usually barefoot and shirtless, unfastened jeans low on his hips. All Alex has to do is peel that tight denim down his thighs.

He should be exhausted. Every night they fuck until they fall asleep, sometimes waking after an hour or two for another go, clumsy and sleepy and more tender than they would dare to be at any rational hour. Then a short dreamless sleep before Alex forces himself awake and sneaks out in the grey predawn light. Michael lets him go, pretends to sleep through his fumbling with the prosthesis and his heavy, uneven footsteps to the door. Alex knows he’s awake, though, because Michael is a restless sleeper; he only goes still when he’s faking. But Alex is grateful for the deception. It makes leaving easier; it’s the only thing that makes leaving possible. He should be exhausted, yes, but those stolen hours of sleep in Michael’s bed leave him better rested than he’s felt in years. Even when the night terrors hit and he forgets where he is, at least he doesn’t dream. Even when he feels the aches and itches of a limb that’s no longer there, Michael’s strong arms and low, soothing voice send him back to sleep.

Against his better judgment, he’s feeling hopeful again.

So that night when Michael cautiously, almost shyly, asks if he’ll stay for coffee in the morning, he agrees. They fuck and they fall asleep and as usual he wakes before dawn, but this time he rolls over in Michael’s arms and goes back to sleep. It’s more than worth it when they wake up together a few hours later, for the expression on Michael’s face and for the wonder in his voice when he says, “You stayed.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! My other fics (anonymous, sorry) for Michael & Alex are HALLO SPACEBOY and BOYS KEEP SWINGING.


End file.
